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Animate me!

I figure this is what I’d look like if they animate me.. maybe not.. I don’t know! If there’s one thing I cannot draw it’s a good copy of a picture of a face.

Incidentally completely off topic, (off the Anime topic that is, but still on the topic of faces) I was trying to draw a portrait of Chad Murray off some picture I found of him on the internet – sufficsive to say this probably looks nothing like him. Anyone have any tips on how to draw hair ?? I appear to have electrocuted the poor chap here – I struggle on mouths too..

EDIT: Went online, looked up some videos on how to draw hair, and decided to give it another go – Still a lot of practice and a long way to go, but here’s the newest one. Also realised I dated the previous one wrongly as October..

First off, the animation-friendly stylised portrait is very good. It’s simple and yet you’ve managed to capture enough of your own face to make it recognisable to a good extent.

About the other portraits, you’re obviously exploring the hair more, but as we were talking about yesterday, it’s the structure and proportions of the face and head itself that needs some work. Part of the problem is that we imagine faces and heads to be near-perfectly smooth blobs, which they aren’t. The tendency is to try to draw them that way, to average out all their sharper features until you have a universal, but unrecognisable face.

To make recognisable, or at least characterful portraits, you need to start thinking of the head as a 3-dimensional object. Even in a straight-on view, the head is still a form and not a flat shape. Something to always keep in mind as you draw and a point that’s well covered here:

Once you get the structure of the head right, you need to then realise that the face too is a complex 3-dimensional shape which many artists have simplified into various sharp planes. Knowing these lets you avoid flattening it all out and keeping the structure of the face, which in turn will help you get the proportions right. See a basic description of the facial planes here: